From left to right, Bishop James B. Magness, Carolyn Magness, Lizzie Hollerith and Bishop Herman Hollerith.

[Diocese of Southern Virginia] The Rt. Rev. Herman Hollerith IV, Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Southern Virginia, retired on Dec. 31, 2018. Bishop Hollerith was elected on Sept. 27, 2008, and was consecrated as the tenth bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Southern Virginia in Feb. 13, 2009.

Hollerith announced his intention to retire in his address to the 126th Annual Council of the Diocese in 2018. “We have come a long way together,” Hollerith told council, “You have taught me much.” He went on to say that the time had come for “fresh eyes and fresh energy to lead the community forward.”

On Feb. 8, 2019, at its 127th Annual Council, the Diocese honored Hollerith for his 10 years of ministry in Southern Virginia. In his address to Council, Bishop Diocesan Pro Tempore James B. Magness gave thanks for Hollerith’s leadership following a very difficult time in the life of the Diocese of Southern Virginia. “For 10 years he worked to build staff and structures that would, as we used to say during my Navy career, right the ship,” Magness told council.

Hollerith undertook a significant diocesan reorganization during his tenure, including the relocation of the diocesan office to a more central and accessible location. He led Southern Virginia in a diocesan response to the sins of slavery and racism, establishing the Repairers of the Breach Task Force. A service of Repentance, Reconciliation & Healing which included a formal apology from the bishop on behalf of the Diocese of Southern Virginia, was held in 2013. Hollerith supported the full inclusion of LGBTQ Christians in the life of the church, establishing the Living a Holy Life Task Force to foster conversation throughout the diocese around issues of human sexuality.

Hollerith has served in numerous leadership roles during his tenure, including as a member of the board of the College for Bishops; a member of the House of Bishops Committee on Pastoral Development; a member of the Disciplinary Board for Bishops; and a member of the board of the Berkeley Divinity School, the Episcopal Seminary at Yale University.

The Standing Committee of the diocese has appointed a Nominating/Search Committee and a Transition Committee to discern bishop candidates and conduct an election. Names are currently being received and an election is scheduled for Sept. 21, 2019. Information about the process and timeline for the election of the new Bishop are available at diosova.org.

The Episcopal Diocese of Southern Virginia stretches from Virginia’s Eastern Shore to the Dan River, with 102 congregations organized into nine convocations. It has 102 active priests and 12 active deacons. Chanco on the James is the camp and conference center, located on the banks of the James River in Surry County. The Diocesan Office is located in the City Center area of Newport News.

[Episcopal News Service] Diocese of Chicago Bishop Jeffrey D. Lee sent a letter to his diocese on Feb. 14 announcing his intention to step down in August 2020. He has called for the election of his successor. The text of press release about his announcement follows.

Bishop Jeffrey D. Lee announced today that he will retire as bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Chicago in August 2020, and called for the election of his successor.

“When I reflect on the work we have done together, I am most grateful for our shared success in focusing the work of my staff and the diocese’s leaders on congregational vitality,” Lee wrote in a letter to the diocese. “As you have often heard me say, the only excuse for something like a diocese is to foster thriving congregations in local communities using the best data and resources we can muster. Together, through prayer and song and fierce conversations, we have accomplished that cultural shift, and it is bearing fruit across our region.”

Lee was ordained in February 2008 to lead a diocese that comprises 33,000 people in more than 120 congregations northern and west central Illinois. His tenure included the reunification of the Dioceses of Chicago and Quincy and a major renovation of St. James Commons, the diocesan headquarters in downtown Chicago, that created a venue for retreats and meetings called the Nicholas Center.

Under Lee, the diocese conducted an examination of the legacy of slavery in its common life, and supported the full inclusion of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and gender queer Christians in the sacramental and ministerial life of the church and policies to stem the tide of gun violence in the region and across the country. Through advocacy and personal support, members of the diocese also worked against the persecution and marginalization of immigrants and refugees.

Planning for the election of Lee’s successor began last night when Bishop Todd Ousley, the Episcopal Church’s bishop for pastoral development, held a teleconference with the diocese’s Standing Committee, which will oversee the search and transition process.

“In my remaining time as your bishop, I intend to do all I can to advance the excellent work of the Taskforce on Hispanic/Latino Mission and Ministry Sustainability, to forge a new partnership between the diocese and Episcopal Charities, and to attract energetic, talented clergy who want to join us in fostering vital congregations,” Lee wrote. “Finally, I hope to leave a gift for the future vitality of God’s ministry in this place by increasing the diocese’s program endowment and supporting the capacity of congregations to raise capital funds.”

The Standing Committee will inform the clergy and people of the diocese about the search process that will soon begin, Lee wrote. The process typically includes the formation of search and transition committees, the development of a diocesan profile, a period of nominations, the announcement of a slate of nominees, and an election in 2020 on a date to be determined.

“As we travel together toward the place where our paths will diverge, I will cherish each remaining opportunity to celebrate the sacraments with you and to pray together for a time of transition filled with hope and trust in God’s never-failing goodness,” Lee wrote.

[Episcopal News Service] Diocese of Virginia Bishop Suffragan Susan Goff issued a statement this week about the series of political scandals that have engulfed the state, which Goff said provide Episcopalians an opportunity to “take a close look at our own lives” and to repent.

“This scandal invites us to confess the ways we have fallen short of the image of God that is in us and to repent, to turn around and act in a different way,” Goff said Feb. 12. “The political realities of this current moment in our commonwealth are complex, but our faith response is not. Out of our own confession and repentance, we can call for the repentance of our leaders.”

Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam has faced widespread calls to resign over revelations that he wore blackface in the 1980s, a scandal sparked by the discovery of a photo on his college yearbook page showing a someone in blackface standing next to another person dressed as a member of the Ku Klux Klan.

Northam, a white Democrat, has said he intends to stay in office as the political uproar has spread to include other top Virginia leaders. Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax, who is black, has since been accused of sexual assault by two women, and two additional white politicians in the state, one a Democrat and the other a Republican, have come forward to admit their own experiences wearing or promoting blackface decades ago.

Blackface’s roots date to the pre-Civil War era, when white performers in the North and South would darken their skin to spoof black characters, often with exaggerated features and gestures that served to glorify negative stereotypes of black appearance and behavior. The tradition, which persisted into the 20th century in everything from pop culture to college parties, is widely condemned today as racist.

“After World War II, black Americans, by dint of a long struggle, finally managed to shame white Americans into not doing blackface anymore. And then other ethnic groups continued shaming white Americans into not doing other kinds of ethnic face since then,” John Strausbaugh, author of “Black Like You,” said in an interview with Vox. “Certainly by the 1960s, blackface had become one of the few very absolute taboos in American culture.”

In the Diocese of Virginia, Goff has taken on the role of ecclesiastical authority while the diocese seeks a successor for Bishop Shannon Johnston, who stepped down last year. The diocese encompasses 38 counties in the northeast third of the state, including suburban Washington, D.C.

Susan Goff

In her Feb. 12 statement, Goff, who is white, alluded to “the painful legacy of racism in our nation.”

“White American culture once not only tolerated white people donning blackface, but embraced it as a form of entertainment. Yet it was always hurtful, demeaning and insulting to people of African descent,” Goff said. “What was accepted back then was not acceptable, and it is not acceptable now.”

The Episcopal Church has identified racial reconciliation and healing as one of its three top priorities, in addition to evangelism and creation care, under Presiding Bishop Michael Curry, the church’s first African-American leader. General Convention in 2015 placed such racial healing work in the context of the church’s decades-old efforts to confront its historic complicity in the sin of racism during the eras of slavery and segregation. Additional resolutions targeting racism were approved in 2018.

Becoming Beloved Community, a framework launched in 2017, has become the church’s cornerstone initiative on racial reconciliation, symbolized by a labyrinth with four parts: “Telling the Truth,” “Proclaiming the Dream,” “Practicing the Way” and “Repairing the Breach.”

The core questions under the heading “Telling the Truth” include, “What things have we done and left undone regarding racial justice and healing?” Goff echoed that question in her message about the Virginia scandals.

“We as people of faith, no matter what our race, gender or ethnicity, promise in our baptismal vows to respect the dignity of every human being. We also know the power of confession, so much so that we engage in the practice regularly,” Goff said. “This current scandal provides us an opportunity to examine not only the lives of our political leaders, but to take a close look at our own lives.

“When have we done or said things that have diminished the dignity of others? In what activities have we engaged that were once accepted, but never acceptable?”

[Episcopal News Service] Diocese of Alabama Bishop Kee Sloan issued a message to his diocese on Feb. 9 announcing his intention to step down at the end of 2020. He has called for the election of a bishop coadjutor, who will succeed him as diocesan bishop.

Sloan first announced his plans in an address to the diocesan convention. The text of his written message to the diocese follows.

Hello, friends

This morning in my address to our Diocesan Convention, I called for the election of a Bishop Coadjutor, who we will elect to become my successor. It is my intention to continue to serve as your Bishop Diocesan until the end of 2020. You will be able to see and hear the address here or read it here, but the essence of it is that I think it’s time for me to step aside for new leadership as we continue to share the Good News of the love of God in Jesus Christ in a changing world.

Diocese of Alabama Bishop Kee Sloan

We will release more details about the process of nominating and electing the 12th Bishop of Alabama when they become clear, but it will likely take a year and a half or so, and after we elect and ordain the next bishop, there will be a few months of overlap so that the transition is orderly and smooth.

The part of us that is always on the lookout for something juicy or scandalous will have to be disappointed this time: I have loved being your bishop, and I still do. I’m not mad at anybody, I haven’t lost my faith, I’m not quitting in a huff, and I’m not being run out of town. It’s just time. By the end of 2020, I will be 65 years old and will have been ordained for over 39 years, 13 as a bishop. By the end of 2020, I will have been married to Tina my sweet and patient wife for 33 years, and we want to have some time for travel and new adventures.

The world is changing quickly, and the Church will either change with it or become a museum. I find myself more and more thinking in terms of The Way We’ve Always Done It, and I have loved the Episcopal Church too much for too long to get in the way now. As I say in the address, “Change looked more fun when I was one of the young priests, leaning into the new Prayer Book, supporting the ordination of women.”

So I guess I’m a Lame Duck now, and there’s not much I can do about that. But it’s not time for goodbyes yet; I’m still the bishop for a while, and I really don’t want to spend the next 20 months saying goodbye every time I say hello. There will be time for goodbyes later, and we have a lot of work to do before then.

[Diocese of Western New York] Bishop Bill Franklin, who will retire as bishop of Western New York on April 3, will become assisting bishop in the Diocese of Long Island in May.

“Bishop Bill Franklin is a wonderfully gifted bishop whose experience and wisdom will add a great deal to the overall ministry of our diocese,” said Bishop Larry Provenzano, bishop of Long Island. “I look forward to welcoming my esteemed friend and colleague to the staff of the diocese.”

Franklin, who holds a doctorate in church history, will work with the Long Island diocese’s Mercer School of Theology, conduct parish visitations and support clergy and lay leaders. He joins Bishop Daniel Allotey and Bishop Johncy Itty, who also serve as assisting bishops. Bishop Geralyn Wolf is the assistant bishop of Long Island.

In retirement, Franklin will also teach a fall 2019 course in liturgical history at Episcopal Divinity School at Union Theological Seminary in New York. He continues to serve as vice-chair of the Board of the Archives of the Episcopal Church and as chair of the Episcopal Church’s Task Force to Coordinate Ecumenical and Interreligious Work.

The Diocese of Western New York will hold three events to celebrate Franklin’s ministry, including a service on April 7 at which Northwestern Pennsylvania Bishop Sean Rowe will be installed as bishop provisional.

A house mom and a tutor help the children with homework after dinner at Vida Joven de Mexico, an orphanage in Tijuana, Mexico. Photo: Lynette Wilson/Episcopal News Service

[Episcopal News Service – Tijuana, Mexico] Routine and order. That’s the rule of life at Vida Joven de Mexico, an orphanage here where 24 abandoned Mexican children ages 2 to 18 live.

The home is located near a maximum-security men’s prison, where in the 1970s a makeshift “village” of poor women and children emerged to live in proximity with the men. It was dangerous; children witnessed violence, assassinations, drug trafficking and abuse.

In 1996, Episcopalians from Los Angeles learned of the village and responded with Vida Joven, which remains in its original 2,000-square-foot concrete building with a 25-child capacity.

“We were meant to rescue kids from danger, we never intended to be a place for kids to grow up,” said Sylvia Laborin, Vida Joven’s founding director, who will retire later this year after 22 years.

Beth Beall, Vida de Joven’s U.S.-based executive director, makes weekly visits to the orphanage from her home in San Diego, California. Photo: Lynette Wilson/Episcopal News Service

In Mexico, abandoned children become wards of the state and are sent to shelters, orphanages, or end up living on the streets. Eighty percent of the children who land at Vida Joven come through social service agencies; 90 percent of them have at least one living parent, though all have been either surrendered or abandoned, said Beth Beall, executive director of Vida Joven in the United States.

Tijuana, which borders San Diego, California, is one of the most dangerous cities on the planet. With a population of 1.7 million, the city’s homicide rate reached 2,500 in 2018. An estimated 3,000 to 4,000 children are in state custody in Baja California, the Mexican state on the Baja California Peninsula, where Tijuana is the largest city.

Drug trafficking is largely responsible for the violence, and many of the abandoned children’s parents suffer drug addiction. For example, four siblings landed at Vida Joven after a neighbor saw the oldest one, a 7-year-old girl, searching for food in the garbage. Both of the parents were on drugs.

“We have more needs right now and I don’t mean food or supplies or whatever,” said Laborin. “It’s the needs of the children, they are lost … there’s a rootlessness.”

A 5-year-old boy, one of four siblings living at Vida Joven de Mexico, puts up chairs after dinner. Photo: Lynette Wilson/Episcopal News Service

Twenty years ago, the children were “very obedient and nice”; today, however, she said, “they are angry with their families, with everything.”

Family is important in Latin culture; it’s customary for children to remain with their families, living apart from their families can be tough for the children, especially teenagers.

“Some have run away to reunite with family, and it hasn’t worked out well.”

Now an institution of the Diocese of San Diego and an established U.S. nonprofit organization, Vida Joven operates on a $320,000 annual budget: with $220,000 funding operations in Tijuana it costs about $8,000 per child, most of which goes to staff salaries, said Beall.

Vida Joven functions with 15 round-the-clock staff members – including a psychologist and a social worker — none of whom live onsite. The children sleep in dormitories: infants and toddlers together in one room; older boys and girls in separate dorms, each dorm equipped with one bathroom. The beds are neatly made, clothing stacked in piles in the closet. There’s an administrative office, a space dedicated to study, a kitchen and a dining area, which also serves as common space for homework.

On a recent Thursday afternoon, following a meal of refried beans, guacamole and tortillas, the children dutifully opened their notebooks and began their homework.

In modern Mexico, it’s impossible to find a job as a cashier without an education; something Vida Joven’s leadership and supporters emphasize. Mexico provides free public-school education, but it costs about $100 to buy the required uniforms to start kindergarten, where in Tijuana the average worker earns $4 per day, Beall.

A house mom helps a girl with her homework. Education is a big part of life at Vida Joven de Mexico. Photo: Lynette Wilson/Episcopal News Service

Many of the children’s parents have little to no education beyond primary school. In the past, students could leave school after sixth grade; today the government mandates a 12th-grade education. However, as Vida Joven’s leadership has found, capacity exceeds space by some 10,000 students.

Vida Joven’s secondary-education aged students attend private school for $200 a month.

“We are fortunate we have donors who really get it and fund education,” said Beall.

In recent years, Vida Joven has received support not just from U.S. donors, but from people in Tijuana who’ve come to support the orphanage, as well.

“This is what salvation looks like, people are rescuing and saving these kids’ lives,” said Beall. “This is a place of healing. Not all of the stories have happy endings, but we do know that if they were not here, they’d be dead or in the sex trade.”

A mosaic was mounted on a wall in the courtyard of Vida Joven de Mexico in Tijuana. Photo: Lynette Wilson/Episcopal News Service

Beall gestures to a mosaic in the courtyard, “These kids have been shattered to pieces, we give them the opportunity to create something better, she said. “We are here to love, protect and educate.”

Before Laborin became Vida Jove’s director she worked as an esthetician. After her husband died and her children married, she closed her shop. She discovered that “not doing anything” was terrible. Then she saw a job advertisement for Vida Joven. She was one of 100 applicants and five selected for interviews.

“I saw this place and it was filthy,” she said. “I thought, if they hire me, I’ll stay for a little while.”

One of the first things Laborin did was clean up the building; it was something she could control Because even with order and routine, no two days are the same. Twenty-two years ago, when the first children arrived, Laborin expected their belongings to follow. They didn’t; they arrived with clothes on their backs.

For the first few years Laborin admits she felt anger toward the children’s parents for abandoning them, until one day a friend told her she had to let go of her anger and put herself in their shoes. After that, she said, she let it go, but admits to this day that sometimes, “I still kinda don’t get it.”

One of the most important things, though, she said is that her eyes were opened to humanity and people’s unseen needs.

“We live in a little bubble; we don’t see,” said Laborin. “I didn’t even know the needs.”

[Anglican Communion News Service] The Central Equatoria internal province has established the first Episcopal radio station in South Sudan’s capital, Juba. It has been named to honor the tremendous role played bySarah Meling, the first provincial president of the Mothers’ Union who served what was then the Episcopal Church of Sudan from 1985. The station is Sit Sarah Radio 98.1FM – the word “Sit” is coined from an Arabic word meaning Madam.

[Episcopal News Service] The Rev. Thomas James Brown was elected Feb. 9 to become the 10th bishop of the Diocese of Maine.

Brown, 48, was elected at a special convention in Bangor. One of five nominees, clergy and lay delegates chose him on the third ballot. He received 57 votes in the clergy order and 84 votes in the lay order. (The diocese’s ballot page does not indicate how many votes were required in each order for an election.)

The diocese made history with the election. Brown will become The Episcopal Church’s only openly gay and married bishop diocesan. He is married to the Rev. Thomas Mousin, who is currently the rector of St. John’s Episcopal Church in Charlestown, a neighborhood of Boston.

The church currently has one other openly gay bishop. The Rt. Rev. Mary Glasspool was elected as bishop suffragan of the Diocese of Los Angeles in December 2009 and consecrated May 2010. She has been an assistant bishop in the Diocese of New York since April 2016. She is married to Becki Sander.

The Rt. Rev. Gene Robinson became the first openly gay and partnered bishop in the Anglican Communion in 2003 and served as the Diocese of New Hampshire’s bishop until his retirement in January 2013. He and his then-partner of 25 years Mark Andrew were joined in a civil union in 2008 and married in 2010. They divorced in 2014.

Robinson’s consecration and ordination became a flashpoint in both The Episcopal Church and the Anglican Communion. Early in 2008, then-Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams refused to invite Robinson to the decennial Lambeth Conference gathering of all the bishops in the Anglican Communion. Some other bishops refused to attend the conference due to theological disagreements with the main body of the church about the full inclusion of LGBTQ people and women in the life of the church.

The Anglican Communion office has not responded to Brown’s election.

After the election, the Rev. Maria Hoecker, rector of St. Columba’s in Boothbay Harbor and president of the Diocesan Standing Committee, said “We have been blessed by the Holy Spirit today with the election of Thomas Brown and the gifts he will bring as our next bishop,” according to a news release.

The bishop-elect told the delegates via a video link, “I give God thanks and praise for this call, and the opportunity to continue building the church in Maine on Christ the solid rock. Bishop Lane and his family, along with the diocesan staff, and every congregation are in my prayers as they continue in the holy work of transition. To God be the glory.”

Brown received his Master of Divinity from the Church Divinity School of the Pacific, an Episcopal Church seminary in in Berkeley, California. He has also served as rector of St. Michael Episcopal Church in Brattleboro, Vermont, and as the director of alumni and church relations at CDSP. Bishop-elect Brown has held many leadership positions in The Episcopal Church and in the Diocese of Massachusetts, and is currently chair of the Church Pension Fund’s board of trustees.

Pending consent of a majority of the church’s bishops with jurisdiction and the diocesan standing committees, Brown will be ordained and consecrated on June 22 at St. Luke’s Cathedral in Portland. Presiding Bishop Michael Curry will officiate. Brown will succeed the Rt. Rev. Stephen T. Lane who has served the diocese since 2008 and will retire in June.

Patricia Carson (Nason) Mordecai, 80, of Scarborough, Maine, died peacefully at Gosnell Memorial Hospice Home on Feb. 7, 2019, from cancer. She was predeceased by her loving husband of 28 years, Donald D. Mordecai.

Patricia (Pat) was born in Orange, New Jersey, and brought up in New Rochelle, New York. She graduated from The College of Wooster in 1960 where she met her first husband, Charles (Chuck) K. Nason. Pat was married to Chuck for 24 years and raised their children in Wayland, Massachusetts. In 1985, Pat married Donald D. (Don) Mordecai. After residing in Wayland, they moved to various places following their careers in Connecticut, Washington, D.C and New York.

Pat had a life-long and commendable career with The Episcopal Church both nationally and locally, including at the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts, and St. Albans Church in Washington, D.C. From 1998 until her retirement in 2006, she served as the chief operating officer of The Episcopal Church at its New York City headquarters.

“The chief operating officer exercises a ministry of care and oversight on behalf of the presiding bishop. I can think of no one more suited to that task than Pat Mordecai. Her previous diocesan, seminary and parish experience, together with her well-developed ability to balance close attention to the proper working of the systems under her charge with respect and care for those engaged in the work at hand, made her the right person at the right time. Pat was a wonderful colleague and a dear friend,” said former-Presiding Bishop Frank T. Griswold.

Following retirement, Pat and Don moved to Castine, Maine, where they were active in town and church affairs and enjoyed gardening, boating, walking, music and reading. In 2011, Pat and Don moved to Scarborough where Pat was very active at St. Mary’s Episcopal Church in Falmouth and the Scarborough Garden Club.

A memorial service will be held at 11 a.m. on March 2, 2019, at the Episcopal Church of St. Mary, 43 Foreside Road, Falmouth, Maine. In lieu of flowers, those wishing to remember Pat may make a donation to The Island Institute (sustaining the islands and communities of the Gulf of Maine), P.O. Box 648, Rockland, ME 04841.

[Diocese of Northern California] The Rev. Megan M. Traquair was elected the eighth bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Northern California at the diocese’s Special Electing Convention on Feb. 9 at Faith Episcopal Church, Cameron Park.

Bishop-elect Traquair is the first woman to be elected as bishop, selected from the first slate to ever include female candidates in the diocese of Northern California. Traquair was elected on the third ballot with a vote of 151 lay delegates and 85 clergy. To be elected required a majority of both orders on the same ballot.

Traquair is currently canon to the ordinary in the Diocese of Arizona. Her husband Philip is a pediatrician at Phoenix Children’s Hospital. They have been partners and best friends as well as parents. They have two children: Hannah who teaches high school in Tucson, and Benjamin, who is an engineer in Colorado.

Bishop Barry L. Beisner said, “As one who deeply loves this diocese, I am personally most grateful to all five candidates for their faithful participation in this very demanding process. By making themselves available to the Holy Spirit in this way, they have given us a great gift. May they all be blessed. I ask all the people of God to join me in praying God’s blessing upon The Rev. Canon Megan Traquair, our bishop-elect. God strengthen and sustain her in this time of profound transition to new ministry, and to an exciting opportunity to serve our Lord in Northern California.”

Providing the Standing Committee receives the consents from a majority of the bishops of the church and a majority of the standing committees of the dioceses, the consecration is scheduled for June 29, 2019, at the Mondavi Center in Davis.

The Episcopal Diocese of Northern California comprises 68 parishes and missions and includes all of Northern California from Sacramento north, except for the five counties of the San Francisco Bay Area.

A pew known as the Jefferson Davis pew is seen among newer pews at St. John’s Episcopal Church in Montgomery, Alabama. Photo: David Berenguer

[Episcopal News Service] The pew had been an unmistakable fixture for decades at St. John’s Episcopal Church in Montgomery, Alabama. Online photos show the pew – a cross-shaped poppyhead carved in its wooden finial – sticking out among the rows and rows of newer, plainer-looking pews that filled the rest of the church’s sanctuary.

One other detail made this pew stand out: It was known as the Jefferson Davis pew and had an accompanying plaque touting its history, a tribute to the Confederate president who attended St. John’s for three months in 1861 before the capital of the Confederacy was moved from Montgomery to Richmond, Virginia.

Today, that pew is in storage. The congregation removed it recently and moved a newer pew from the back of the sanctuary to take its place. The plaque was removed, too. “To continue to allow the pew to be in our worship space would be troublesome,” the Rev. Robert Wisnewski, rector at St. John’s, said this week in a message to the congregation.

Confederate President Jefferson Davis is seen in this portrait by Matthew Brady. Source: National Archives

At a time when Episcopal churches and institutions across the country are reckoning with their historical ties to slavery, the Confederacy and Jim Crow segregation, Wisnewski and vestry members took steps to set the record straight at St. John’s. They removed the Jefferson Davis pew, Wisnewski said, because its ties to Davis were false and its dedication ceremony 89 years ago was a political act steeped in racism, which runs counter to Christianity.

“Davis was a political figure, not a church figure, nor even a member of the parish,” Wisnewski wrote. “Acting to remove the pew and plaque is the correction of a political act and hopefully will help us all to focus more completely on the love of Christ for all people.”

Wisnewski, when reached by email, declined Episcopal News Service’s request for an interview, saying he had “nothing to add to the statement I’ve made,” though he clarified why the church began scrutinizing the history of the pew and plaque.

“In teaching a Sunday school class this past fall, I became aware of the pew’s dedication not occurring until 1925,” said Wisnewski, who has served at St. John’s since 1995. That detail was the first loose thread that led to the unraveling of the story of the Jefferson Davis pew.

Wisnewski noted the plaque at St. John’s called Davis “a communicant,” but Davis was not yet a confirmed Episcopalian when he attended services at St. John’s. The pew that was dedicated in 1925 wasn’t an original, Wisnewski said. The congregation had replaced the old pews with new ones in the early 1900s. By the 1930s, a pew from Davis’ era had been re-installed and labeled, but its ties to the Confederate figure were uncertain at best.

More troubling was evidence that the 1925 dedication ceremony championed white supremacy as openly as any nods to local history. Its timing, with racism and segregation on the rise, coincided with the “Lost Cause” campaign across the South, which sought to rehabilitate the image of the Confederacy and its leaders by denying the South fought the Civil War to protect slavery.

Montgomery’s roots in antebellum South

In the 1950s, Montgomery would become a pivotal battleground in the civil rights movement, with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., as pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, joining others in leading the successful Montgomery bus boycott. But a century earlier, Alabama’s capital city was known as a commerce hub in the slave-powered cotton empire of the antebellum South.

St. John’s Episcopal Church in Montgomery, Alabama, is seen in an undated historic photo. Photo: St. John’s, via website

Montgomery “was the exhilarated, thronging capital of the Confederate States of America” in the first months of 1861, the guidebook says, and Davis was inaugurated the Confederacy’s president in the city on Feb. 18.

“We have no way of knowing how many times he or his family attended, perhaps only a few times or perhaps as many as a dozen times,” Wisnewski said in his message to the congregation about the Davis pew. “Since Davis was not confirmed, it is probable that he never received Holy Communion here and technically was not a communicant.”

After leaving Montgomery, Davis was confirmed in 1862 at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Richmond, once known as the Cathedral of the Confederacy. Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee also worshiped at St. Paul’s.

Pew plaques and stained glass windows at St. Paul’s had long touted the Richmond church’s historical ties to those two prominent Confederate figures when, in 2015, St. Paul’s launched its History and Reconciliation Initiative to re-examine that history and consider whether changes were warranted.

A massacre was the catalyst.

On June 17, 2015, Dylann Roof opened fire at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, killing nine black worshippers. When photos surfaced of Roof posing with a Confederate flag, it fueled a nationwide debate over the racist legacy of such imagery and its embrace by white supremacists.

At St. Paul’s, the congregation decided to remove all representations of Confederate battle flags but to keep family memorials to fallen Confederate soldiers, and the congregation left untouched its plaques marking the pews where Davis and Lee once sat.

In 2017, a violent clash between white supremacists and counterprotesters in Charlottesville, Virginia, over the fate of the city’s Confederate statues led to a new round of national debates and amplified calls to remove such symbols from public display, including at Episcopal institutions. Washington National Cathedral in the nation’s capital removed stained glass windows depicting Lee and a fellow Confederate general, Stonewall Jackson. Sewanee: University of the South in Tennessee moved a statue of another Confederate general from a prominent spot on campus to the university’s cemetery. R.E. Lee Memorial Church in Lexington, Virginia, changed its name back to its original Grace Episcopal Church.

“The argument is simple: The Confederacy fought to maintain slavery and white supremacy in the United States, and this isn’t something the country should honor in any way,” Joe McDaniel Jr., a member of General Convention’s Committee for Racial Justice and Reconciliation, said this week in an interview with ENS.

McDaniel, a 58-year-old retired lawyer living in Pensacola, Florida, said he has followed closely the debate over Confederate statues and other memorials in recent years. He disputes arguments that removing such monuments amounts to erasing history. The monuments were not motivated by Southern pride or benign historic preservation, McDaniel said, but rather to promote a cause that was dedicated to keeping black Americans enslaved.

“Most of America is finally coming to terms with that,” McDaniel said. “I applaud St. John’s action in moving the Jefferson Davis pew.”

Little doubt about Davis pew’s racist pedigree

Vestry members made that decision last weekend at a planning retreat, Wisnewski said in his written message, after he brought his research on the pew to their attention, including the evidence that the pew was not in place for the 1925 dedication.

“The lore that the pew had been in place since the beginning of the Civil War and always known as the Jefferson Davis Pew is not true,” Wisnewski said.

The rector also discovered details of the 1925 dedication ceremony, which featured a speech by writer and historian John Trotwood Moore, known as “an apologist for the Old South” who espoused virulent white supremacist rhetoric and defended lynching.

John Trotwood Moore was known as an “apologist for the Old South.” He spoke at the dedication of the Jefferson Davis pew in 1925. Source: Tennessee State Library and Archives

A 1999 article in the Tennessee Historical Quarterly provides a description of Moore’s speech at the dedication of the Jefferson Davis pew, based on contemporary newspaper reports. The event was attended by Alabama’s governor and other civic leaders, and Moore was “their natural choice to deliver appropriate words,” according to the article’s author, Fred Arthur Bailey.

In addition to hailing Davis as a “pure blooded Anglo Saxon,” Moore made a case that racial purity and white superiority were part of Davis’ legacy.

“We are the children not of our father and mother but of our race,” Moore said. “It is well to teach our children that they are well bred, descendants of heroes. Only the pure breed ever reaches the stars.”

Wisnewski indicated that Moore’s role in the dedication of the pew gave little doubt about its racist pedigree.

“Confederate monuments and symbols have increasingly been used by groups that promote white supremacy and are now, to many people of all races, seen to represent insensitivity, hatred, and even evil,” Wisnewski said.

“The mission of our parish is diametrically opposed to what these symbols have come to mean. … Even if the actions which brought about the Jefferson Davis Pew in 1925 were only to memorialize an historical fact, and that appears improbable, the continuance of its presence presents a political statement.”

The vestry voted to remove the pew and place it and the plaque honoring Davis in the church’s archives.

“This was not done to rewrite our history or to dishonor our forebears,” Wisnewski wrote in his message to the congregation. The current vestry would not vote to add such a pew honoring Davis, so it would be “troublesome” to let the existing pew remain.

“St. John’s prides itself in being a spiritual home for all people and a place where politics takes a back seat to the nurture of our souls,” Wisnewski said. “Our worship space is sacred and should direct our hearts to the love of God without distraction.”

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